User blog:Kombatgod/About Ready Player One
Ok it took me a while to decide to write this post, because I wanted to make the Ready Player One page, but right now I don't have time to do a frame by frame analysis of the movie, so I postponed that. But I did watch the movie, and I wanted to let you know what I think about it. I mean from a crossover perspective, in case anybody else wanted to write the page in the meantime. If you want to know my personal opinion on the movie I thought it was ok. Nothing too special. It does get bonus points for all the cool cameos (I personally loved Goro and Jim Raynor), but they're cheap points, it's not like they cleverly wrote them in the story or anything, beside a few exceptions, for the most part they're just there because they paid for them or they're WB properties, so it didn't blew me away like say a Kingdom Hearts style crossover would. Anyway about the Ready Player One page, I think all the cameos and guests of any kind should be type 2 links: all the properties are fictional within the Ready Player One universe. That's pretty obvious, but we can't leave it at that: within OASIS, the movie's fictional game/vr world, we get a lot of apparent type 1 crossovers, like characters fighting together and fighting each other... I believe that creates an undirect type 1 link between the featured properties: basically while there's a type 2 link between RPO and King Kong, since he's fictional in the movie, there'd be a type 1 link between King Kong and OASIS, since he's real within that world. So I think the RPO page should have a note saying something like While elements appearing within OASIS only create a sub-universe link with the Ready Player One series, interactions between them might create an undirect in-universe link. For details see '''here'.'' With a link to a page like "Cameos and crossover within OASIS". Now, this page is a Summary link page, listing the cameos within the OASIS (so it would ignore characters quoting movies or mentioning games and other random stuff). I think this page is very needed, we can't just leave it at the note saying that there's the undirect type 1 link between the series, because I don't think that's true for all of them: NPCs like King Kong and Chucky, or the Shining level are easily acceptable as type 1 links, but what about the players' avatars? Should they just count as skins? I mean again, probably they shouldn't when they have special abilities, but what about those who are just there, looking the part but not acting the part? One character is disguised as Goro at one point, so that specific one shouldn't count right? But as Goro all four arms are functional, so maybe that should count and all the others shouldn't? And even if we counted all these, I don't even get if they're licensed within the movie's universe, or if they're custom made. Speaking of which what about Iron Giant? He's not just a skin, he's really a giant robot with eye-lasers and everything, right? But wait a minute, he is custom made in the game! A character built him from scratch, he wasn't programmed in! So maybe he shouldn't count! What about the bike from Akira? It looks like the real thing, and it's functional, but in the movie they say it's just a custom body over a standard frame. So I think all these should be discussed (and possibly come up with a final, albeit arguable, virdict for each cameo). It kinda irritates me how easily they ram all these cameos in with no discipline, if only OASIS had a fictional story, like it was described as a place where heroes from different worlds would gather, but nope, it's just described as a place for players to escape to. Even the name just stands for "Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation", so I almost think it shouldn't even count as a fictional world, but rather just a vr software... Yup, like VR Chat. If it wasn't for those few npcs, especially the original ones, like Anorak, I wouldn't consider it. To add insult to injury, the end credits don't even list the singular licenses, but only the companies, making a proper classification even harder. Here, I took photos of the licenses at the end of the credits: RPO credits1.jpg RPO credits2.jpg sorry that the first one is blurry, it still can be read with a little effort. Oh one last thing: in all this I only talked about the movie, because I don't think the same should be applied to the book. I don't think the book requires any license to mention characters, because of the nature of the media: even when they play a role they never appear per se. So even if we can list the book references as type 2 in the Ready Player One page, I don't think they should create any undirect link between them worth mentioning in the summary page. Category:Blog posts